


Everything, and Everything Else

by Leamas



Category: A Perfect Spy - John le Carré
Genre: F/M, Multi, nearly 13k words of Grant being Grant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-21
Updated: 2017-01-21
Packaged: 2018-09-18 17:37:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,619
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9395969
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Leamas/pseuds/Leamas
Summary: If anything in Grant's life was ever straightforward, it only looked that way on the surface.





	

It isn’t late but the workday has ended. People have started to go home but there are still a few stragglers – people finishing off a few last-minute things that can’t wait, or getting comfortable for the long night ahead.

Grant has been there. He knows what it’s like when someone expects something on their desk the next day, when there isn’t even enough time to consider how few hours there are in each day. He understands because once he was a rich law student who could have earned his place there in his own right but didn’t have to, and every hour spent working himself to the bone was a product of that resentment. He’s sat on the edge of all-nighters. He’s been intimate with the long, dark nights, when the only light at the end of the tunnel is the ever-approaching sunrise, when the boulder collapses and he gets to do it all again. And he’s found himself meaning to leave as soon as he’s done with this one last thing, only to find his thoughts wrapping around a new problem and holding him hostage. Then it’s too late. If he gets free he might make it home before Bee gets too angry with him, but then it’s eleven and he hasn’t moved yet and he’s missed his cut-off time, so he may as well stay longer.

But tonight isn’t like that.

Tonight, Grant can’t wait to finish. He’s a carbon copy of the family man, eager to get home to his wife and kids.

Tonight, he’s finished – just as soon as he fills out this one last form – and when he looks back at tonight with hindsight he’ll tell himself that this is important. That it means something.

 

 

Grant sits at his desk. Through a glass panel on the wall he can see people coming and leaving, but mostly they’re leaving. It’s Thursday; people can’t wait to get home so they can get Friday over and done with.

It’s five-thirty. There are three people with him in the office – two that he can see, and one he hears shuffling around the copy machine. Two of them look set to spend the night, but the third catches Grant’s eyes and they share a look of mutual freedom.

He pushes his chair back. “That’s me,” he tells Grant.

The man’s name is Charlie. Grant thinks it suits him, with the innocent quirk of his lips and his wheat-coloured hair.

The request form Grant has just finished sits in front of him. Grant scans it quickly for the final time and decides that it’ll do. He’s been working all afternoon, and stayed on for an extra half hour to finish all that. Now his hand has a cramp, and his fingers are smudged with ink. This is just one final thing he’s decided to finish, just so it isn’t the first thing to greet him the next morning.

“I just need to drop this off, and then that’s me.”

Charlie says, “Okay. I’ll walk out with you.”

“I need to stop at the store to get something,” Grant says.

He waits for the last of his papers to dry and then makes sure they’re in order.

“Bringing something home for Mrs Lederer?”

“That’s right,” Grant says. He’s flushed, and doesn’t even care. By now Bee will have worked out that he’s working late again. She’ll still be hoping he makes it back in time for dinner, but she’s never believed in miracles.

He can see it clearly: Bee, sitting at the head of the table with Becky and the twins, trying to bribe the twins into eating their veggies and drinking their milk, even if Becky is too old to be bribed now. Every so often Bee will steal a look at the plate and silverware she’s set out for Grant again. The set-up is old; tonight won’t even make it to the mental inventory Grant knows she privately keeps of all the ways Grant fails at being a husband and a father, and why he’s not even that fun to have as a lover anymore.

But then the door will open. Grant will let himself in and lock it behind him. When he walks into the dining room Bee will be talking to one of the twins. Becky will be half-listening to her mother but mostly looking on at the doorway, at Grant and the flowers he’ll have in one hand and the bottle of wine he’ll carry in the other.

 _You wait here_ , he’ll tell Bee before she can get up. _I’ll take care of everything_ , – and then he will.

 

 

Grant clips all his papers together. “Let me just get rid of these,” he tells Charlie. He doesn’t bother to sort out his briefcase because he’ll be right back.

 

 

Briefly, he considers just dropping it off in the morning. In the future he’ll say that this is important, too.

 

 

Grant estimates it takes just a few minutes to get up to the archives if he walks quickly, but instead he walks with an even pace because while he might have signed over his soul to these people, he won’t run for them. It takes three minutes longer to get there than it could have.

Grant knocks on the door. The archives answer with a rough _come in_ , so Grant obliges.

There’s only one man working there. His name is Eric Avery. Grant doesn’t know his story, although he’s seen him around. He’s from piss-fuck-middle-of-nowhere Maine, and the two of them bonded once about what being from the middle of nowhere means. Avery told him, South Bend is one of the biggest cities in Indiana, and Grant had said, “Yes, but it’s in Indiana.”

That had earned him a laugh, and a firm clap on the knee.

“What do you want?” Avery asks.

He sits folded over his desk with no less than three reference books open in front of him.

“Can I leave these with you?” Grant asks. He waves the request forms next to his head. Avery grunts, and points to an already occupied spot on his desk.

“Put them there.”

Grant comes in. The door to Avery’s private office clicks shut behind him.

What Grant knows about Avery is mostly run-of-the-mill office gossip. He had a good job overseas with a clear path up the ladder, once, before he pissed it away doing god knows what. The most likely story, according to some, is something about being caught in a compromising position with some Lithuanian girl, and something else about potential blackmail material. Personally, Grant doesn’t think that story added up – if something happened with a girl, it hadn’t been Avery’s idea.

He drops his request form where Avery told him to.

Tonight, Grant Lederer might want to get home, but he isn’t so eager that he doesn’t stop to look what Avery is doing. But he is still in a hurry -- Bee is waiting for him at home, after all, with the kids. Charlie mentioned walking out with him. He wants to stop by the store for some flowers and wine – the nice stuff that Bee married him for.

He still takes a look at Avery’s desk; it comes as second nature to him, to notice things. The papers are scattered everywhere, in books and on top of them. His papers are bogged down with legal jargon, and handwritten annotations. Eric Avery grips his pen firmly even as he watches Grant watch him. His fingers are smudged with ink.

Wherever this man had once intended to go, he’d never reached there. Whatever stories about him were true, the one he was living now was not. He looks at Grant like an injured animal defending its rotten home under the front porch because it’s all it has left. The people who work in the archives are a joke, and Avery knows this and isn’t laughing. He and Grant might have only met once before, but Grant feels the gripping seriousness that radiates from this man. Avery would give anything for the chance to be anywhere else, and he’d do anything if it meant being able to step outside of himself.

The Grant that is Bee’s husband and his children’s father closes his eyes, and a new Grant makes his way to centre stage. This Grant hates DC and misses Indiana. He’s ambivalent about his job, but unlike the Lederer lying in wait for when he gets home, this one doesn’t think it’s too claustrophobic. It’s not holding him back, or anything, or depriving him of anything that he wants.

This Grant’s eyes have landed on Eric Avery, and are sincerely clueless as to why no one else’s have.

With his now free hand Grant gestures towards the papers scattered around Avery. “I can give you a hand with that sometime, if you want.”

“How can you help me?” Avery asks, terse.

“If you need me to decipher any of that jargon – you don’t seem to know half of what they’re asking you, do you?”

“You’d be right about that.”

“Well, let me know what I can do.”

“I will.”

Grant stands up straighter. He makes to walk around the desk.

Eric Avery grabs his forearm. Grant looks down at him.

“I can point you in the right direction, if you need it,” Grant says. He leans over Avery’s desk, gripping the side of the desk to support himself because there’s no space big enough to rest his palm on the desk itself. “But I am in a hurry. I have a life outside of here, hard as that is to believe sometimes.”

He glances over to Avery.

Avery shifts his grip to hold Grant’s upper arm, then pulls Grant forward. He’s stronger than Grant expected, and faster. The doors to who the hell he used to be open wider with all the possibilities. His other hand grabs the back of Grant’s neck and slams their mouths against each other.

This new Grant severely underestimated the situation.

 

 

When Avery lets go, Grant is too stunned to say anything, or to move. When he finally does it’s to straighten up and try to yank his arm back. Avery’s grip loosens, but his hand still rests on Grant’s shoulder.

“What the hell was that?”

Grant pulls his arm out of Avery’s hand and puts one foot behind him. He wants that big overflowing desk between himself and Avery – or better yet, the door. Once he gets to the hallway he’ll be safe. He doesn’t know from what, exactly, but identifying the danger is secondary to knowing it’s there.

He’s moving. So is Avery. He grabs Grant’s forearm again and pulls himself out of his seat, then slams Grant against the wall.

Grant has about five seconds to lash out, and he uses them well. In one second he raises his arm to put a barrier between himself and Avery. In the next, he pulls back his fist and punches Avery in the side. Then he pushes at Avery’s chest, hard. It’s enough to put some space between them, but not a lot. Never mind the desk – if he can get out from between Avery and the wall, Grant will be free.

Avery slams his hands on the wall on either side of Grant’s body. He punches Grant in the stomach, hard, and then the face. His hand catches Grant under his jaw, the V of his palm landing on Grant’s throat and using it as leverage to slam his head back against the wall. Grant is dizzy. He’s probably stronger than the average man but although his appearance gives away nothing, Avery is stronger. He closes the gap between himself and Grant and keeps him held there, one of his knees forcing itself between Grant’s and one of his hands covering Grant’s mouth.

And then ----

* * *

A psychologist once accused Grant of narrativizing his whole life, but for all that Grant agreed that maybe he could work on that, he thought it was a pile of crap. Grant always knew he wasn’t special. There were only two advantages a person could have that counted – money or luck – and everything else just happened. It still mattered that he understand his situation, and his place in the world. How else was he supposed to awkwardly shuffle forward with the rest of the masses?

Call it narrativizing – Grant called it making sense of the world, and answering his question of how the hell he got as far as he did on just a hope and a prayer and the occasional bout of manic fury that drove him harder than a nuclear reactor, and left just as much wreckage in its wake.

 

 

Hypothesis one: the only reason things work between himself and Bee is because Grant knows how to walk the fine between telling her everything, and keeping everything else to himself.

 

 

Take tonight.

Grant Lederer III is standing on some street in America – DC, specifically. It’s dark. He has his briefcase in one hand and his jacket folded over his other arm.

Tonight, Grant Lederer III fucked up. He could have come home as soon as he was off the clock, but he had just one more thing to get done. He could have left it. He could have taken his work home with him.

He didn’t.

No problem! He can get home before supper’s finished, and surprise his beautiful wife with some beautiful flowers and expensive wine.

None of that happened.

It was seven by the time he left work. He was still unsteady on his feet. Getting behind the wheel of the car seemed like a stupid idea, but what else could he do? On the walk back to his car he wondered about investing in bus fare – a common conversation he had with himself, usually while he was stuck in traffic. Right then the very last thing he wanted was to be trapped shoulder to shoulder with a bunch of strangers. He never wanted to be touched again.

This brought him to his next problem.

His oldest kid would be awake again, and she’d want a hug. His wife would want him to go say goodnight to the twins. And if she wasn’t too pissed at him for abandoning her that night, too, for the nth night that month – that year – in their whole relationship together – then at some point that night she might slip her hand around his shoulders and settle her palm on the back of his neck, then use it as leverage to pull him in for a kiss.

Grant did not want to go home.

And so Grant made his second fatal mistake that night. He sat in his car and decided to wait until eleven -- around the time his wife started going to bed. At about that point, he’d roll out and begin a long, leisurely drive home. If everything went to plan, he’d get in around midnight. Giving himself an hour to shower, he’d be crawling into bed around one. After a long day of looking after the mini-Lederers, Bee would be out like a light.

He hadn’t thought about how long that would be to be stuck sitting alone in his car, cold and sore and thirsty. His eyes ached, and his head stung where it had been cracked off the wall. The longer he sat the worse the pain in his back got, until he was shifting around every ten minutes or so. He wanted a shower. Eventually, he leaned his seat back and closed his eyes, but that only lasted until a car door slamming shut alerted him that someone else was there, and it occurred to him that Avery could have followed him out if he wanted. Avery could also just happen to run into him while he came out looking for his car, too – the possibilities were endless.

He sat up again to keep watch on the door out of the parking lot.

Ten minutes later that door opened and Magnus Pym walked out.

Grant watched as Pym walked to his car. Somewhere – distantly, like a small child trying to get his attention – Grant wonders what the hell Pym is doing, and why he has a second bag with him. He had the slow pace of a man who was expected somewhere, and resented that. Grant recognised it because just a few hours earlier he’d walked with the same slowness as he made his way up to the archives to drop off a small request form. The last Grant saw of that form, it was sitting on the desk of one Eric Avery, who said he’d pass them along to the relevant person in the morning. Whether they’d ever make it or not was a question that Grant quite honestly didn’t know the answer to.

A Lederer inside of him wanted to howl in anger at the great injustice of that. Another wanted to weep. A third wanted to find something heavy in the trunk of his car and storm up back up to Avery’s office to introduce the two, and then climb to the roof and jump. Instead he only watched Pym as Pym walked to his car, and watched as Pym noticed Grant.

It would have been too easy for Pym to keep walking.

“You’re here late,” Pym said when he reached Grant’s car.

“Yeah.”

Pym looked wide awake, with his green eyes bright and a pleasant smile on his face. He carried a bag over one shoulder, along with his briefcase. He lingered on Grant’s face, and every second of focus went to smoothing his features.

“If I’d known you were here, I would have stopped and said hi.”

“It’s nice to see you around,” Grant said. “It looks like you have a lot to keep yourself busy. But look, it’s great seeing you, but I need to be home. Bee’s expecting me, and I want to see the kids before they’re packed off to bed.”

A quirk crossed Pym’s smile. For a second there it looked real.

“Grant, has Bee put you in the doghouse?” Pym asked.

He leaned his whole weight against the door of Grant’s car, and rested a hand on Grant’s forearm where it rested in the car window. Like he’d been burnt he yanked it back inside. All he wanted to do was push Pym away and drive off, never mind where he was going. Grant wasn’t that popular of a guy – of the people who did recognise him on sight, about half of them were marked up on Grant’s mental checklist of Not Lederer Fans. Running into literally any one of them would have been preferable to Pym, though. At least they just didn’t like him. There was none of this.

Grant grinned sheepishly. “Yeah, all right. Maybe. I should pick something up for Bee on my way back, what do you think?”

“That’s all you need to do,” Pym said. “She just wants to know you’re thinking of her.”

“Is that what you do for Mary?”

“Well, yeah,” Pym said. “I am thinking of her.”

Grant’s grin widened. “Okay. Okay, that’s a good idea. I’ll go do that, right now.”

He grabbed his keys and stabbed them into the ignition. It took a few tries because his hands were shaking suddenly. Grant couldn’t drive like this. He couldn’t stay and talk to Pym, either.

“Have Mary call Bee and set something up,” he said.

“Okay,” Pym called. “Maybe next time you can drive me home.”

Grant backed out of there like a bat out of hell, and took the longest way home he could think of before he had to admit that he was avoiding it.

 

 

Bee Lederer doesn’t know any of this. Her evening so far has been had been normal.

Becky came home from school, as usual. Grant didn’t come home from work, again. Bee made dinner. Bee served dinner. Bee tried in vain to make her children eat dinner, and then cleaned up after dinner and left a little something for Grant, whenever he made it back. At six she put the twins down. At seven she peeked into Becky’s room and checked her homework, then patted her daughter on the back of her head and told her to have a bath and lay down. She went back to the living room and plopped her feet up on the end of the sofa and watched some TV. It was only eight-thirty, but she was already dozing by the time Becky came down for a kiss goodnight.

When the front door opens and her husband stumbles in, Bee sits up but doesn’t get off the couch. She keeps her eyes glued firmly on the TV so that when Grant comes in to check on her he won’t think he’d bothered her, or that she even noticed that he was back. This was the only Me Time she had left – her Bee Time, as Grant once said (once), and her throat stings suddenly for wanting so badly to laugh and cry at the same time.

Like hell is she giving up the few hours she has alone for someone who doesn’t care enough to make it home for dinner. He doesn’t even stop by the living room to see her, and instead goes straight for the stairs.

What was it? What the hell was she doing wrong?

 _No, it’s not you_. It wasn’t Grant either. Well, it was – but not just him. Not personally. It was a personality quirk – a perk of the job, another wife had told her once, back when she’d been really new to this. She met him while he was still in law school – it was a given that he’d have a stressful job. So this was both super unexpected, but also exactly what Bee imagined when she first dreamed about spending the rest of her life with him.

Had it really only been a few years? It felt like a lifetime ago – a whole relationship ago, at least.

 _Oh my God, Bee_. _You’re cheating on the man you married with the man he turned into._

 

 

Around eleven the door to the Lederer master bedroom open and Bee steps in. Half an hour ago Grant stepped out of the shower, and fifteen minutes after that he crawled into bed, pulling the blanket over his head. If Grant’s passing out so quickly again it means he might be hers for a while, between this giant bite he took out of life and the next one. They’re all more than he can chew and it’s painful to watch him choke – almost as painful as it is to be part of the rest of the life that he neglects.

Bee undresses, and slips into her nightie. She checks that the alarms are set, then turns off the light on her nightstand and lies on her back.

She sits up a second later, hissing, “ _Grant_.”

The light comes on again.

“Bee, it’s late.”

“My pillow is soaked!” she says. “I could wring it out if I wanted to. I’ll probably have to, if I don’t want to drown in my sleep.”

He rolls over. Bee stops talking.

The blanket is pulled up around Grant’s shoulders. He’s tired, and his head still hurts – he doesn’t know if it’s from having his head smacked off the wall, or something else.

Bee is gorgeous when Grant looks at her, prettier now than when he first saw her all those years ago. He wants to freeze her like this – how angry she is at him, how much she regrets looking at him and still loving him, how her face is already frozen in shock as she sees him for the first time that night.

She doesn’t even know why she’s shocked. That’s the best part.

“Can we please talk about this tomorrow?” he asks.

Bee’s shoulders slump. “Grant.”

“Please, Bee.”

The image breaks. Her face goes soft, and her hand touches the pillow beside his head, and when he waits a moment too long she takes her pillow and leaves to hang it up to dry. 

* * *

Everyone who matters knows that the most important asset is who you know, and whether they’ll be willing to vouch for you. Grant Lederer III knew Grant Lederer II, and Grant Lederer II made a few cleverly timed phone calls to the right people, around about the time his son was about to be done with college. On any odd day that Grant can be bothered to remember, he’ll praise his old man and make a toast to his spirit in Heaven, or wherever he ended up in the end. Grant knows that he was very lucky to have a dad who’s good with his phone, and who once provided the money half of the luck-and-money answer to success.

It started out that simple, anyway. By the time Grant Lederer III was twenty-eight, he had a job he couldn’t even tell Grant Lederer II about.

He walked into that job with a newfound gratitude for his restless nights when he couldn’t even hear himself think, but could get three days’ worth of work done and still be ready to go the next morning, when the light at the end of the tunnel broke and he needed to get himself back in there. It had tasted like acid building up in his mouth that he could spit in the eyes of anyone he wanted, if only there wasn’t the stipulation that he keep his mouth shut. He wasn’t going to pretend it didn't feel good to walk with that perpetual gag order, to lock a whole part of his life away from the rest of it.

His first taste of that kind of power was when he was six, and his darling big sister hit him again – hard enough, this time, to leave a bruise. He didn’t realise at first, and neither did she; Grant didn’t imagine he’d have been allowed to live if she’d known about the evidence she left on his face, but just that once the spirits of Luck and Justice were shining down on him, and his swollen eye escaped detection until morning.

She stared at him with haunted eyes when she came in. Her face sunk; dread clotted her mouth and silenced her as she watched him take his place at the table.

Grant heard her, though, and she said, _I was wrong. I shouldn’t have done that. I thought I could get away with it but I couldn’t._

When his mother said, “What happened to your face, Grant?” he had the sense to look sheepish.

He looked up at his sister, like he was looking to her for reassurance. The vein on her neck was throbbing at about a thousand beats per second. He said: _I know what you did to me._

He looked back at his mom, and made up some stupid story about climbing too high up one of the trees and falling.

“For Heaven’s sake, Grant,” she said, shaking her head, and then asked why his sister hadn’t done a better job watching him.

She never hit him again after that, or caused him any trouble for that matter. It wasn’t long before darling little baby Rebecca Lederer was old enough to take part in the secret war between the girls, which was enough to keep them both occupied. Meanwhile his two brothers – the back-up Lederers – were no different. They had a bone to pick with him for being there first, and Grant knew for a damn fact that they got a kick from keeping him out of the loop.

It didn’t bother him. They could have each other, and their knives to stab each other (and him!) in the back, because he had a different target. He went straight for the head, and at twenty-eight he came out on top.

From that meagre victory, he saw just how high he could reach.

 

 

One hypothesis Grant sometimes entertains is that people hate him for how young he is. It’s stupid, because Grant can think of a thousand better reasons for someone might hate him. He’s arrogant. He’s right a lot of the time. He spends a lot of time thinking about how he’d murder any one of his colleagues, and while he isn’t open about this he suspects that in a building full of spies at least a few of them will have picked up on it, like how he knows which colleagues would have thought the most about killing themselves and which ones have made plans to kill someone else, and like how he’s felt Pym’s hatred for America – the kind of hatred reserved for something he sees as precious and that he wants to love, but can’t. The kind of hatred belonging to something he sees as his.

It’s completely different to how Pym hates him – that’s a sadistic loathing, and there’s nothing complicated about that.

 

 

Anyway, Bee’s only three months older than he is so age would rank last on the list of reasons why she hates him, or wants to.

 

 

Breakfast on Monday is served at seven – the same time Bee serves it every day, but on Mondays it feels earlier. Grant sits at the head of the table, with Becky on his left. Becky’s legs swing back and forth on her chair, and her head swivels around so she can follow Bee as she walks around the room.

“Why don’t you tell your dad what you’re doing at school today,” Bee says. She fixes Grant with a pointed look as she dishes out scrambled eggs on top of his toast and moves to sit at the other side of the table.

“Well,” Becky says. “Mr Finch is bringing in the pet hamster today. Okay? I saw pictures and it’s really cute. Can we get one?”

She looks between her parents.

Bee looks at Grant.

“Maybe,” Grant says. “What happened to Mrs Finch.”

“She’s _married_ , Dad,” Becky says.

“Yes, Grant,” Bee says. “She couldn’t be _Mrs_ Finch without a _Mr_ Finch somewhere in the picture, now could she?”

“Right, right,” Grant says. “Sorry. That was really stupid of me.”

He looks at Bee. It’s more endearing when Becky explains the obvious than when Bee does it. He wonders how long it’ll be before she grows into her mother’s condescension – she’s a spitting image of Bee already, with her blond hair and freckled nose and smooth jaw. She’s already picked up some of her mother’s speech habits. Okay?

The only thing she gets from Grant is his eyes.

After Becky leaves for school Grant sorts through his briefcase one final time while Bee washes up.

“I talked to Mary last night,” Bee says.

“Did you?” he asks, because what’s new?

“Yes,” she says. “She asked how you were.”

Grant pauses, then resumes looking through his papers. He switches from counting what’s there to looking for something – what that thing is, he hasn’t decided yet. He’ll know when he finds it.

“What did you tell her?”

“That you were fine,” Bee says. “She knows how men can be.”

She’s married to Magnus Pym – simultaneously the best and worst example of a human male.

“That’s good of her.”

“Okay, Grant. Listen. She said Magnus saw you last Thursday. You were sitting in your car. What the hell, Grant?”

He doesn’t answer right away. She goes on.

“Is that what you’re doing when you don’t come home?” Bee asks. “Is it? I know you’re busy, Grant. Listen. I know. I don’t ask questions, Grant. Do I?”

“You’re asking questions right now,” he says.

“It’s my right.”

“I tell you everything.”

“Then tell me why you were sitting in your car,” Bee says. “Tell me. Go on. Tell me.”

She turns around, her arms crossed over her chest. He’s seen her yell before, although not often. For her part, she’s good at being his wife. She’s good at being a mom, and she’s good at loving him. Not just anyone can do that. It takes a special kind of patience. At one function or another he looked around at all these woman treating this like a fashion show, or a gala: the chance to be the political socialite they secretly dreamed of being. And then there was Bee, who understood from the beginning that she was part of the same game that Grant played, her and all the other women. And if it was a game, she was out to win.

Somewhere down the line Bee must have decided that Grant changed the rules without telling her.

“I was sick, Bee.”

“Sick,” she says. “How many other times have you been sick?”

“Never.”

“But you were that night.”

“Yes,” he says.

His back hurts. So do his thighs. In the morning when he was getting dressed he checked for any bruises and found a few small ones on his arm from being so roughly grabbed, and a solid one where Avery punched him in the side. There were some bruises and nail marks on his hips, too, and while he doesn’t feel them the way he feels the bigger bruise on his side, or Avery’s hand landing on the back of his neck, he knows they’re there.

“Bee,” he says. “Bee, you know I don’t lie to you. I tell you more than I should, don’t you know that?”

“How do I know that?”

He feels a smile spread grotesquely across his face. “Because I’m not supposed to tell you anything.”

“But you do.”

“Everything.”

“Why didn’t you tell me, then? About last Thursday.”

Bee wants a fight. It’s in her eyes, and her short answers. She just wants so damn much from him and he doesn’t know what to tell her. It wouldn’t be hard to give it to her. Three long strides across the room and he could take her by the neck, slam her against a wall, and from there he can start showing her why he took his time getting home that night.

“Do you want me to say that I hate you?” he asked. “Or that I hate coming home to you? Is that it?”

Probably – that’s what Grant would be waiting to hear if he was married to himself. It’s what he tells himself damn near every day. Bee’s a special woman, but she isn’t a stupid one. She knows she can do better than Grant, even if she does a good job making it look like for all intents and purposes she’s stolen a good life from a more deserving woman.

“Grant.”

“I’m going to work,” he says. “I’m probably late already.”

He shoots her a smile and she looks down at her feet. “Will you be home tonight?”

“Yes, Bee. I will be.”

“Good.”

She walks him to the door and holds it open for him. Before he leaves she grabs the front of his jacket and pulls him closer, bringing his face down towards hers and kissing him hard. He feels himself tense but decides to just roll with it – it’s body memory for him at this point. This is Bee, and her forced kisses taste a lot sweeter than Avery’s.

 

 

While he sat in the car the night before Grant took an inordinate amount of pleasure in knowing that Eric Avery was the type to kill himself, if push came to shove. He also tried to let himself be thrilled by the new secret he was walking away with, but his body still hurt from having it shoved so tightly into him.

 

 

Magnus Pym is back again, and Grant really, really wishes that he weren’t. Some other people from the embassy are there, too, and Grant’s being herded into an out of the way room with them. There aren’t enough chairs so someone dashes out into the hallway to get some more. Grant finds the seat on the furthest end of the table and collapses. Pym sits next to him – they’re best friends, so no one questions it, even if Pym should be sitting on the other side of the table with the rest of the Brits.

“I’ve been spoiled over here,” one of them is grumbling. He’s standing, while his colleagues are all seated. “This is the first time I’ve seen them run out of anything over here.”

Next to him, Pym snorts. He has a swivel chair, whereas Grant does not. He’s turning back and forth so his knees brush against Grant’s legs, even when Grant shifts away from him. He shoots Pym a look, sour and bitter, but Pym just smiles. He’s joking, so it’s all okay.

“Um – ah – um, excuse me? Excuse me,” Wexler says once all the chairs are brought in, and then repeats himself a third time for good measure.

Everyone looks at him.

“Now, if we can just start, we’ll uh – well, we’ll be able to go to lunch soon, won’t we?” Wexler says, and then he begins.

Every word that comes out of his mouth makes Grant want to scream. To make matters worse, right next to him is Magnus Pym, lord of the spinny chair. The metal squeaks right in Grant’s ear every time Pym shifted, and Pym had it down to a science how to sit still for just long enough that Grant would start to relax before moving again. If he were in literally any other situation Grant would have seriously considered picking up his own chair and cracking Pym around the head with it, or at least screaming for Pym to shut up and to stop _moving_.

He leans over the papers in front of them and tries to concentrate every iota of his being into focusing. It’s hard with the squeaking in his ear and Wexler’s voice grating on him like a cheese shredder run down his back, but he tries. He just needs to make it few the next hour or so and then he has his lunch break. It’s Wednesday today. It’s only two more days until the weekend.

Pym leans across the table to ask a question, brushing shoulders with Grant. Grant freezes.

“Sorry,” Pym says. His hand rests a hand down on Grant’s forearm.

In that moment he is certain that Magnus Pym knows what he’s doing. He knows that Grant wants to claw his way out of his own skin, and can probably feel that the night before Grant spent over an hour in the shower, rubbing his skin raw. He can’t have known what happened – not unless he was also paying a visit to the archives and Eric Avery decided to just spill the beans that he’d pushed Grant up against the wall and --

Could Grant be surprised? If anyone was going to charm a confession out of someone purely in the name of gossip, it was going to be Pym.

Grant’s core temperature has dropped so fast that he feels unbearably hot, and sticky. The room is too small, and Grant is too far away from the door.

Why can’t he just sit still? This isn’t the worst thing that’s happened to him – last Thursday was worse, for example, and after that initial attempt at punching his way away from Avery, he didn’t really have a problem just standing there and while he let it happen.

He pulls his arm away from Pym’s hand and takes the paper off the chair. He looks very hard at what he’s holding in his hands, and at his fingers. He looks at his wedding band, and hides that hand behind the papers so he can’t see it.

 

 

They break for lunch. Pym is nice enough to walk with Grant back to his office so he can grab some money, even though Grant couldn’t care less about eating right now. He can still taste Bee’s toast and scrambled eggs on his tongue, and they feel slimy and moist. No matter how much he swallows he can’t shake the texture. Whoever said it was possible to taste how much love a chef put into something was right.

“I have a lot to do,” Grant says. “I might just stay behind and keep working.”

“Are you sure?” Pym asks. He leans against Grant’s desk as Grant gets down on one knee and pretends to be looking for something in his bottom drawer. He can’t ignore Pym’s leg, only a few inches away from his arm.

“Yeah,” he says. “Just go. You must be starving.”

“You looked like you were going to pass out in there.”

“Well, I’m not.”

“You’re sure?”

“Just go to lunch,” Grant says. “I’ll catch up with you – this weekend. Whenever my people have to meet with your people again.”

Magnus Pym does the unthinkable. He pushes his jacket out of the way and crouches down beside Grant. Too late Grant realises that he’s cornered between Pym and the wall, closed into this tiny space by Pym’s body and his desk.

_If I can just get to the other side of this desk –_

“Magnus,” Grant says.

Pym raises a hand and touches the back of his palm to Grant’s forehead. Grant freezes. Pym isn’t looking away from his eyes. He takes a moment to flip his hand around so the inside of his palm catches Grant’s skin, which is Grant’s cue to pull his hand off him and shove him away.

“For god’s sake, Magnus,” Grant says. “I’m not a kid. I can tell when I’m sick.”

Pym stands up with him. He doesn’t move out of Grant’s way, so they stand mere inches apart. Grant wants out of Pym’s sight, but he doesn’t want to be the first one to leave, and Pym is Pym; he’ll leave when he wants, or when he’s forced to leave. Pym’s hand reaches for Grant’s wrist when he reaches for his wallet on the desk, and Grant shudders.

“I was only checking,” Pym says. He has the audacity to sound innocent as he says it, which just makes the whole thing worse.

_It’s okay, Pym. It’s only us here – there’s no one else around to see what a freak you are. Just me, and we both know that I’m as bad as you are._

_We both know all you really wanted was to see me squirm. You just wanted to make me uncomfortable. You wanted to confirm that I don’t want to be touched, by touching me everywhere._

Grant is so tired. He looks into Pym’s eyes. Why are you here, Pym? What are you playing at?

And then, quietly, another hypothesis quickly begins to form – what happened to him happened to Magnus Pym, too. 

* * * 

There isn’t any room inside McDonald’s, so Grant and Pym buy themselves some lunch and sit in Pym’s car while they eat. Grant’s barely sat down before he’s talking.

“Do you know a man named Eric Avery?”

“No,” Pym says. “Should I?”

“No, you probably don’t. He works in with the archives. What do you think of that?”

Pym takes a giant bite from his burger and follows it up with a fry. “I can’t say I think much.”

“Well, count yourself lucky, Magnus,” Grant says. “They’re the biggest joke of a department you’ve ever seen.”

Pym waits.

“Last week,” Grant says, to the dull realisation that it has been a week exactly now, “I dropped some papers off. I needed special permission to get my hands on something, that kind of thing. I was going to go home after that.”

“This was urgent?”

“I think so,” Grant says. “It needed to be done, and that’s what matters. So I went – I dropped it off with the only person I could find who was left. And you know what, Magnus?”

“What?”

Grant’s voice catches. He ignores it, taking a giant bite out of the burger in front of him for distraction, then carries on as he swallows. “I haven’t heard a damn thing back. By this point I have half a mind to assume that our good old friend Avery up there didn’t bother file it correctly. Have you seen the state of his desk, Pym?”

He turns on Pym like an interrogator who knows his man has an answer, but still needs him to say it. Grant doesn’t even know if he should be looking for a confession or an explanation, though, and Pym is only smiling at him with the deepest sympathy.

 _I hear you, Grant_.

Had he heard yesterday? When they were on the ground, Grant trapped between Pym and the wall? He couldn’t even remember what he’d been thinking – it was all drowned out by the mass of weight that was Pym. The Pym in his memories is a lot bigger than the Pym sitting beside him in the car, and more predatory. The Pym Grant is with now seems almost docile, and curious.

He asks, “Can you follow it up?”

“I could,” Grant says. “I probably should, shouldn’t I? This is why I love you, Magnus – you always have the easy answers, don’t you?”

But it is not an easy answer. Grant can’t imagine walking that long walk again – three minutes if he power-walks, ten if he takes it really slowly. He’s had to run over there often enough to drop things off or to reference something or anything. It’s a nightmare as far as paperwork goes, but all he can remember about it now is that desk.

 _There’s something lurking in the archives. A dark secret we’re keeping stashed away among all our other dark secrets_.

“Here’s a question, Magnus,” Grant says once they finish their burgers. “Temporary insanity. What do you think?”

Pym doesn’t answer right away. He looks through the windshield, reflective for a moment. What had Pym seen? What did Pym know? Or a better question, the one Grant really wants an answer to – what has Pym done?

“It happens enough that I can believe in it.”

“But what about all these people who are every kind of stressed and still never lose it?”

He thinks about Bee sleeping on the couch when he arrives home, Bee sitting at the head of the table for dinner, Bee when he first met her and when he first brought her out and how she would laugh, pushing her hair out of her face. She had this habit of looking down and to the side when she was nervous, and on their first date she looked down a lot. She hadn’t done it in a while.

He thinks back to Monday, and to Bee glaring at him, and to what they’d thought of doing to each other.

“Not everyone has a murderous streak, Grant.”

“Just us, right?”

“Right.”

“And a whole lot of other people,” Grant says. “Apparently. It’s a legal defence. Not guilty by reason of temporary insanity. And I believe it, sure. It makes sense, doesn’t it?”

“Unless you were prosecuting.”

Grant hates Pym and his understanding, but nonetheless he looks him in the eye and nods. “Right.”

“Or if you were attacked unprovoked,” Pym says.

“Would it ever be unprovoked with me? Listen, Magnus,” Grant says. “There’s something I know. Something I think you know, too, that you understand about as well as I do.”

Pym’s eyes are dead. His gaze is detached. Grant wants to get out of the car and walk away before he says anything else, but something keeps him riveted. For the first time in this conversation, Grant has Pym’s attention.

“Last Thursday.”

“Yes,” Grant says. It’s all he can say. He thinks back to Pym walking into the parking lot, bag over his shoulder and briefcase in hand. He remembers what it felt like when Pym looked at him then, and compares it with how it feels now.

“What do you need, Grant?”

“Eric Avery.”

“What about him?”

He looks up at Magnus Pym. Pym is still listening. Waiting.

What do you want me to say, Magnus?

“He’s crazy,” is all Grant can tell him.

“Is he a liability?” Magnus finally asks.

“I don’t know,” Grant says. “Probably not. But there’s something wrong with him. You know the type.”

 _We are the type_.

Pym nods. “Yes, I know the type. We’ve all met them – we have to work with them on occasion. Grant?”

“What?”

Pym rests a hand on his arm. His touch is light, and almost delicate. It’s only coincidence that he touches the same part of his upper arm that Avery used to throw Grant against the wall last week, because Pym has no way of knowing that. The thing is, Grant doesn’t believe in coincidences.

“You’re my friend,” Pym is saying. His thumb is moving against the fabric of Grant’s jacket. It’s a sensual touch, but Pym is not a sensual man – least of all with him. “Let me do a favour for you.”

“That depends what kind of favour you want to do.” Grant leans forward. He pushes his arm into Pym’s hand and invites Pym to wrap his fingers around it. Pym obliges, trapping Grant. If it ever comes down to it, Grant has his guesses about which of them would be stronger, and who would come away in a better position.

“I’ll go down to the archives,” Pym says. “And I’ll ask around, about whether anyone knows what came of your request. What was it about, anyway?”

“Oh, Magnus,” Grant says. He slaps Pym’s leg with the back of his hand. Annoyingly enough, but predictably, Pym doesn’t respond other than to tuck his foot further under him. “I can’t tell you that, Magnus, can I? It’s all classified.”

Magnus nods. “That’s fair. But I’ll talk to them for you.”

 

 

One day Grant will think about this with hindsight, too.

 

 

On one occasion Grant dreams of being pinned against the wall by Magnus Pym, with Pym’s knee forced between his own and Pym’s hand at the base of his throat. In this particular iteration of this long fucked up nightmare Grant remembers how to use his arms and reaches for Pym’s throat. His fingers find flesh and he matches the pressure in his own neck, until Pym hits him.

Grant doesn’t usually feel things in dream but he feels that. He feels Pym’s hand pull away from his neck and drive itself up into his stomach. He feels Pym backhand him around the face, then punch up. His knuckles connect with Grant’s jaw. Grant’s head shoots upwards. Pym grabs his hair and slams him against the wall, and Grant buries his thumb in Pym’s tendons.

Pym punches his lips so hard his teeth come loose, and when Grant spits, he’s spitting enamel.

Grant dreams photorealistic. There’s blood on his lips and he tastes it, and his arms are an angry red already from being held and gouged into by Pym’s nails. His own blood shines on Pym’s fists, and his own knuckles are bruised from where they hit Pym and his stone-cold heart.

He looks up at Pym with wild eyes and laughs hysterically, all while Pym keeps hitting him. This can’t be real! This has to be a dream! What else could it be! The real Pym would never do this to him!

And then Pym stops. Everything stops.

In his dream, Magnus Pym leans close and kisses Grant so very gently, and Grant wonders whether it’s actually a dream at all.

 

 

Bee wakes up to Grant making soft, gasping noises beside her, shaking his head from side to side. He’s never slept easy, but usually it’s not like this. Usually his problem is falling asleep, and staying asleep. She’s caught him awake in the middle of the night, heaving like he forgot the taste of air and staring at the ceiling like it might collapse on them both. By morning he was asleep again. It isn’t something he’s ever mentioned.

She takes Grant’s shoulder and shakes him awake. He’s already turning over in his sleep and sitting upright in bed. His hand makes its way to her arm and he holds her.

As a mother with children of her own, she wants to hold him; a man gasping in his sleep like a scared child moves her in that way. As his wife, she wants to recoil, and to never touch him again. But marriage is making a choice about what family you get to keep, which is more say then she had as a child herself or as a mother, who took what she was given and loved indiscriminately. She knew who she was inviting into her house when she opened her doors to Grant.

When he finally looks at her, he looks scared.

“Did I wake you up?” he eventually asks.

“No,” Bee promises.

She puts a hand on his shoulder and uses it to guide him back down to the bed. Grant doesn’t let go of her arm, and eventually pulls her down with him. She rests her head on his shoulder and lets him run his hand through her hair.

Bee takes his cheek in her hands and pulls him over to face her. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. Why?”

“You were making noises in your sleep.”

“I wasn’t talking, was I?”

“No,” she says. “Just gasping. Like,” and she mimics the sound. It gets her a laugh out of him. When she falls back onto his arm it’s the most relaxed she’s felt in weeks.

“It was just a dream,” he says. He frowns. “It was nothing good, but it’s just that.”

She nods, lying on his chest and listening to him breathe. He hasn’t been receptive to anything she’s tried to do for these past few weeks, but oh, when is he? It’s always been the same with him. He’s either running after something so far in the distance that she can’t even imagine it, or he’s still, his momentum dead. She can’t tell where he is right now. The only thing that stays consistent is his smouldering intensity. Something has his attention.

“Will you be able to get back to sleep?” Bee asks. “Or should I get you something to drink?”

“Warm milk?” he asks. “Like the twins?”

“Be serious here.”

“Ah, an adult drink then.”

“That’s the last thing you need, Grant.”

They fall silent. They never did have that talk that he promised her, but can she really bring that up now? This is the first chance they’ve had in weeks to be together, just the two of them. All this time she thought she just wanted him to say something, to give her an answer, but she’d take his silence over the strained, troubled conversation he’ll give her any day. Words roll easily off his tongue when he wants to, and they’re halfway between what she wants to hear and the truth.

Well, right now she wants the silence. Right now, Bee just wants Grant. Everything else will be a bonus.

She pushes herself up and leans over him, chest-to-chest, her mouth touching his.

One of his hands reaches up to take her shoulder, and the other finds her thin waist and pulls her over him. They’re silent. She lets him kiss her, then pull her down against his chest and holds her.

 

 

Becky’s legs swing back and forth, the backs of her heels slamming into the counter. Every time they do Tom blinks, like a cat. He’s transfixed, like a cat drawn to the movement. If he were any older Grant would have to be telling Tom to stop looking and to be appropriate, but he’s young. It’s unlikely that he’s even worked out that he and Becky are different – Bee says they’ll fall in love one day, and Grant really, really hopes they don’t. Being legally bound to Magnus Pym sounds like a nightmare and a half.

“Why don’t you two make yourself useful?” he asks.

He hands Becky the salad, and hands Tom a leek. “Have your parents ever taught you how to chop vegetables?”

Tom’s eyebrows pinch together and he frowns. “Yes.” He takes the leek, and the knife that Grant hands him. “I didn’t even know you have leeks over here.”

“Of course we do,” Grant says. “Where do you think we live?”

Tom moves over to the cutting board. Becky watches him, leaning around Tom’s head so she can see what he’s doing. He cuts the leek very slowly, but neatly. It’s a shame the thing is going to be blended up, but Grant doesn’t tell Tom that. He’s Pym’s kid, a Pym himself – if he’s anything like his dad, he probably won’t care.

“Your mom taught Bee how to make this,” Grant tells Tom, leaning back against the counter. “A cultural exchange. Do you and Becky do that?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, she’s shown you around. Given you some real chocolate, and not whatever it is they feed you over there. Haven’t you, Becks?”

“ _Don’t call me that,”_ Becky says. She slams her foot against the under-counter cabinets again and continues to mix the salad, angrily this time. “And _actually_ , I like the chocolate Tom has more than the chocolate here. English chocolate is better, I think.”

“What about accents?” Grant asks. “Would you want to talk like Tom?”

“Yes,” she says. “And I’ve been practicing, too.”

She looks at Grant, challenging him to say anything. It’s his eyes looking back at him, on a younger Bee’s face. Always challenging him. Always asking him for something. She’s nothing like her mother, though. Bee just wants him to yield, again and again. She’s always wanted that, from the first shy date he went on. Becky wants something to push back against – well, he can give her that.

Tom is laughing. He’s trying not to, but both father and daughter can hear it. Becky’s face breaks out into a smile, and then she’s laughing, too. Grant has no idea what’s so funny but he leaves them to it – kids will always have their secrets, and by the looks of it Becky has found her first person to keep them with.

“I don’t know what to do with you guys,” he says, and walks out of the kitchen and into the living room, where the women are sitting on the floor, the twins sitting between them. Their cups of tea rest on the little table. Like a pair of cats they both look up when Grant walks in. Mary pretends to be outraged when he steals a twin, and meanwhile the other one doesn’t even notice his lookalike is missing.

“Are you done in there?” Bee asks.

“I’m letting the kids do it,” Grant says. “Anyway, you don’t want to start until Magnus gets back, do you?”

Bee settled back against the chair. The remaining twin climbed onto her lap, and she pets him like she would a little dog.

“I’ve heard you’ve been busy, too,” Mary says.

“Indeed.”

“Maybe one day you two will have some time off at the same time,” Bee suggests.

“Time off?” he repeats. “There’s a joke. Say, Mary. The other day Bee told me Magnus mentioned he ran into me in the car park.”

She turns her head up at him. She’s alone here, a Lederer on every side and only Tom as her ally – and Tom’s been corrupted by the power of a pretty, loud girl close to his own age.

“Yes, he did say something about that,” Mary said. “That was almost a month ago, though.”

“Was it?” Grant asks. “You wouldn’t happen to remember what he told you, though.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Just that you were sitting out there.”

“He didn’t say I’d fallen asleep or anything, did he?” Grant asks. “Or that I’d been drinking – I don’t want rumours like that started, Christ.”

“On, nothing like that,” Mary says. “He said you were sick, though.”

“He was sick all right. You should’ve seen him when he got back,” Bee says. She raises her eyes to look at Grant.

_That’s why you punished me over that one detail for weeks, right? That’s why you didn’t believe me that morning, when I said I was sick._

“I was sick, all right,” Grant agrees.

“I didn’t realise you were so fussed about women gossiping.”

“I just want to make sure I’m still leaving the right impression,” Grant says.

He hands his child back to Mary, then goes to the kitchen to supervise the kids he left alone with the knives.

 

 

Over dinner, Pym asks, “Did you ever hear back about your request down in the archives?”

“My request has been received, apparently,” Grant says. He pauses, and takes a bite out of a brussels sprout. “That’s more than I could say last week, at least.”

 

 

At work Grant stares at the ceiling and thinks about Becky. She’s seven this year – a whole five years older than her younger brothers. When they were born she was delighted because they were cute, and hers to show off. Her parents signed her up for a lifetime of being the older sister, trapping her in a contract Grant could only hope she wouldn’t go through life trying to break.

They’re lucky, Grant thinks. For now, they get along.

But how long will it take before she starts resenting her brothers for sharing something she’ll never be part of? Or will she not care? Will she grow so distant from them that they may as well have had completely different upbringings – a V growing apart year after year, joined only by their parents and not a lot else.

It’s wishful thinking to ever imagine that he’ll be the parent she keeps secrets from. To be that parent, he has to be a part of her life and he’s not.

He thinks of her, and Tom, and remembers how they laughed together. He tries to imagine Becky running away to England to be with him one day – assuming that’s where he settles down. It’s a horrible thought to even imagine that one day she might be Rebecca Beverly Pym, but he can’t help it. She’s still Bee’s daughter now, through-and-through, still in the starry-eyed days where she wants to be her mother. One day all she’ll want is to get away from that. It’s cruel to imagine that she’ll run into the arms of Grant’s counterpart in a pitiful last attempt at escape.

* * *

Grant doesn’t make it to his desk before Wexler is walking up next to him, taking him by the arm and saying something about an urgent issue that needs attending to, ah, right away, so if Grant could be so kind –

“Can I take off my jacket first?” Grant asks.

Wexler looks at him like he’s grown a second head. Heat rises to his cheeks, but he quickly nods. “Yes. Yes, go do that. But hurry, this is – it’s important.”

Ten minutes later Grant finds himself sitting in front of Wexler’s office.

“We’ll all be meeting to discuss this issue later,” Wexler starts. “But I just want to clarify one tiny thing. Your name came up, in relation to a man named Eric Avery. Have you heard of him?”

Grant sits up straighter. He doesn’t know what this is about, but he knows he won’t like it. A horrible feeling of dread is sinking him.

“Sure,” Grant says. “A few weeks ago I dropped some requests off with him. I’m still waiting to hear back on that, but that doesn’t have anything to do with him.”

“Do you know why Magnus Pym might have personally asked that your request be forwarded?”

“I was complaining to him about how long it was taking to come back to me,” Grant says. “He said he’d see if he could have any words.”

“Despite being English.”

Grant frowns, trying to think back to that day in the McDonald’s parking lot. The memory is a mess, but slowly his memory of Magnus clears. There’s something very sinister about how small he looks in hindsight, and how his hand trailed over Grant’s arm, touching his shirt. It was all he could think about at the time, and it’s all he can remember now.

He remembers how dead Magnus’ eyes were, and what it was like to hold Magnus’ full attention.

“I didn’t expect anything to come of it.”

“Right.”

Eric Avery’s name came up then, too. It was a week after he’d dropped off that request, and he’d still heard nothing back. That wasn’t unusual. It was a bit strange for Pym to offer to help, sure. It was a bit strange to think about him wandering up to archives and asking if someone would please pay attention to poor Grant Lederer, he’s dying out there.

Had it felt strange when Pym met him in the parking lot?

Grant can feel Pym’s hand on his cheek again, and he can feel Pym looming, backing him against the wall.

“What’s this about?” Grant asks. “He’s not dead, is he?”

He remembers what he thought over and over again in the car: _this is a man who could kill himself, maybe I’ll be lucky and he will. Maybe this temporary insanity will last long enough that he can wrap a noose around his neck and jump, or swallow a bullet._

“What makes you think that?”

“Why else would you be asking about this?” He looks around the room, like Avery might be somewhere in here.

“He’s not dead,” Wexler reassures him. He looks down at the table in front of him. Some papers are scattered around his desk, although in organised stacks. “There’s, ah. Well, there will be time to discuss this later. But, well, evidence that will be gone over in more detail, later, has been found that Avery might have had – shall we say – a conflict of interests.”

“A conflict of interests,” Grant repeats. “Really?”

“We’ll be meeting to discuss later,” Wexler says, suddenly more sure of himself.

Grant wonders what Pym will make of this.

 

 

Tonight, Grant Lederer III will stop by the store to pick up flowers for his wife, and a bottle of wine. He called her at lunch to tell her this, and to ask if she could push dinner back until seven. He’d heard Bee frowning down the line at him.

“The kids will be hungry.”

“Feed them first, then,” he said. “We’ll wait until they’re in bed and then eat, if you want.”

“Grant,” Bee had said – half exasperation and half thrill. “Why? Are we celebrating something?”

“Do we need to be?” he asked. “I can make something up, if you want.”

He was in his office, talking quietly. There was still the chance someone else might hear him. Whoever was monitoring the phones would definitely hear – Grant knew this, Bee knew this.

“I suppose not,” she said. “Okay. When do I get you back?”

“Late,” he said. “But before nine. Don’t worry about it.”

He has a few stops to make before he goes home, and it can’t wait until tomorrow. He’s itching for a shower, and for this day to already be over with so he can lie in bed and admire Bee’s beauty. He wants to pick her up and to climb on top of her, to run his hands all the way across her body and kiss her a thousand times, and then some.

But he wants to drag this out, and to savour how much he wants her. He wants to arrive home like a man who walks slowly simply because his arrival is expected.

“Okay,” she said. “I won’t. And Grant?”

“Bee?”

“I do love you.”

“I love you, too.”

 

 

Grant finishes his work and at five starts getting his things to leave. The Lederer who doesn’t hate his job because he does it for to keep his family safe waves goodbye to everyone on his way out and leaves with Charlie, and this Lederer flees as soon as soon as he sees Magnus Pym standing by the car. A more tired Lederer relieves him and crawls out to face the music.

This Lederer claps a hand on Charlie’s shoulder.

“I’ll see you Monday.”

Charlie waves goodbye, like it’s a shame, then walks off because it’s Friday and he wants to be here a lot less than he wants to be at home.

Pym turns when he sees Grant approach and takes a moment to look surprised to see him, like anyone else would walk up to Grant’s car while it’s parked all the way out here. Grant sets his briefcase down by his feet and leans his arm against the roof of his car.

“Do you need a ride home or something?” Grant asks.

“Oh, no,” Pym says. “I can take the bus. Well,” he thinks for a moment. Then he smiles. “That wouldn’t be so bad. Do you have any plans for the weekend?”

“Bee,” Grant says. “And I’m take the kids to the zoo tomorrow, assuming no one needs me for anything here. You know how it can be. You heard about Avery?”

He knows Pym has heard about Avery because he saw Pym’s name on a list of people to notify. Pym is, after all, very important over here in Washington DC.

“You thought he was crazy,” Pym says, and Grant can’t help but feel that he’s being accused of creating this situation in the first place.

“He seemed it,” Grant says. “Temporary insanity. What do you think of that, it looks like I was onto something.”

Pym looks at him curiously for a moment.

“Why do you say temporary, Grant?”

“He looks it. The kind of guy who you look at and think he’ll snap and do something stupid.”

“It looks like he just couldn’t deal with the stress of passing along information from the archives,” Pym says. “He was in an ideal place for it. Access to whatever he pleased, and enough bitterness to rival you. Don’t you think?”

“Yes,” Grant says. “Convenient. Right?”

Pym nods.

On the drive home Grant asks, “Say, Tom wouldn’t want to come along with us, would he? I’ll have my hands full with the twins, so god knows Becky will want someone to play with.”

“I’ll ask him,” Pym says. “Will it be just you, or will Bee be there?”

“I’m giving her a break,” Grant says.

“That’s nice of you,” Pym says.

“I can be,” Grant says, as he pulls up to the Pym family house. “Sometimes. This is you, then?”

They sit in silence for a while. Before Pym gets out of the car his hand finds its way to Grant’s shoulder again, and an apologetic half-smile crosses his face when Grant flinches. He pulls Grant closer. His hold on Grant is not so strong that Grant doesn’t think he could get away, if he wanted to, but there’s nothing to get away from. He doesn’t have his back to the wall. He’s not stuck between a rock and a hard place. He lets Pym pull him closer, and when Pym kisses him he lets it happen.

 

 

An exchange between friends.

 

 

On his way home Grant swears, _Bastard!_ But no one is there to hear him besides the Lederer who kissed Pym in gratitude, and because he wanted to kiss him. That Lederer laughs like his lungs have been pulled open, and is pained.

 

 

The kids have finished eating by the time Grant comes in. He sets the bottle of wine on the kitchen counter and the flowers next to them, then slips up behind where Bee is washing the dishes and runs one of his hands down the small of her back and leans forward to kiss the crook of her neck. There are a thousand places on her body that he can touch, and at one time or another he’s held every one.

His skin hurts where it brushes against hers. He wanted to sit down and close his eyes on himself for a while, but instead lets her sink back against him as he touches her hips. Slowly he moves his hand to meet in front of her chest. It’s all body memory. If he had to explain to someone else how he touched her, he’d forget, but after so long loving her has been encoded into how he moves.

She sets the plate she was watching back in with all the suds, then reaches across the counter for one of the dishtowels to dry her hands. Grant puts his hand on her elbow. Slowly her hands return to the sink in front of her.

“Guess what I learned this morning.”

“What?”

“Turns out the guy stuck dealing with our requests down in the archives might have been answering some other requests,” he says, and waits to see if she understands.

Bee says, “Oh my god.”

“But not ours,” Grant says. “Although this sure does explain the wait time.”

“Grant!”

“What?” he says, defensively. Then he looks down, almost shy. “I shouldn’t be telling you this.”

Bee stills against him. “Then don’t.”

He can feel her heartrate kick up. One of his hands slips under her shirt and traces a pattern on her skin.

“Is this what we’re celebrating, Grant?”

“If you want to be morbid, sure,” Grant says. “Here’s to catching the bastard.”

“You didn’t know him?”

Grant shrugs. “We met once or twice. One and a half times, let’s say. Just to call it even.”

“That isn’t calling it even, Grant,” she says.

He puts a hand on her hip and turns her around, to kiss her and to shut her up. When he breaks it, she’s looking up at him in awe and with familiarity. Bee doesn’t believe in miracles but things have righted in her world. “Don’t talk too much about this, okay? Not even with Mary, or anything. Let this be ours.”

“I don’t talk about any of the things you tell me.”

“Good,” he says. “Because I do tell you everything.”

 

 

One Lederer tastes Bee’s lips like poison – the taste of almonds to the selected few that can taste cyanide. That Lederer is silent, and crying. Grant can’t meet him halfway. He can’t touch him. He can barely stand to look at him. While every other Lederer is pissed beyond belief, this one is betrayed.

 

 

Another Lederer tastes Bee’s lips and thinks of Magnus, and feels very cold.

 

 

It’s nice to have the house to herself, and Bee thinks Mary agrees. They sit in the kitchen, hunched over the table. Bee’s foot trails aimlessly on the floor behind her, and Mary sits perched up on one of those tall stools. A window is propped open, even though it’s a bit chilly today.

“He has his moments,” Bee is saying. “But all men do. Especially men like him.”

She holds out her cigarette for Mary to light it. As Mary does, she sympathetically nods and looks back up to Bee. “There aren’t many men in the world like them.”

“They’re rare,” Bee agrees. “But we love them, don’t we?”

“Of course, dear. That’s why we married them.”

“I’d marry him again,” Bee says. “If he wanted to do it all again, I would. Right? Just for moments like that. I don’t care that he’s…”

She trails off, and waves the cigarette in the space between herself and Mary. Mary waves away the smoke and catches her drift. She leans forward, cutting through the space reserved for the comparison between their husbands.

“He’s charming,” Mary says. “And if he’s anything like Magnus, he’s always charming.”

They share a smile.

“Look,” Bee says. “Grant’s charming, but he can be a handful sometimes. But then he’s gentle. Really gentle, okay? And I love him for that.”

“I know,” Mary says, and Bee believes her.


End file.
